Soon after he took office, President Clinton addressed American
University's Centennial Convocation. In his speech, Clinton focused on the
economic leadership America must exert at home and abroad as a new
global economy unfolds.

Thank you very much, President Duffey, distinguished members of the board
of trustees, and faculty and patrons of American University, and Members
of Congress, members of the diplomatic corps, and my fellow citizens, and
especially to the students here today. I am very honored to be here today
at this wonderful school on the occasion of your centennial, at the dawn
of a new era for our Nation and for our world, and deeply honored to receive
this honorary degree, although I almost choked on it here. |Laughter~

My mind is full of many memories today, looking at all of you in your youthful
enthusiasm and your hope for the future. I'd like to say a special word of
thanks to all of you for the warm reception you gave to the person to whom
I owe more than anybody else in this audience, Senator Fulbright.

When I was barely 20 years old, Senator Fulbright's administrative assistant
called me one morning in Arkansas and asked me if I wanted a job working
for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as an assistant clerk. Since I
couldn't really afford the cost of my education to Georgetown, I told him
I was interested. And he said, "Well, you can have a part-time job at
$3,500 a year or a full-time job at $5,000 a year." I said, "How
about two part-time jobs." |Laughter~ He replied that I was just the
sort of mathematician they were looking for and would I please come. |Laughter~
The next week, literally a day and a half later, I was there working for
a person I had admired all my life, and the rest of it is history. But Senator
Fulbright, now 88 years young, taught me a lot about the importance of our
connections to the rest of the world, and that even in our small landlocked
State of Arkansas, we were bound up inextricably with the future, with the
passions and the promise of people all across this globe. And it is about
that which I come to speak today.

I also want to say a special word of thanks to your president, Joe Duffey,
and to his wonderful wife, Anne Wexler, who have been my friends for many
years. When I was a young man at Yale Law School, I went to work for Joe
Duffey in his campaign for the Senate. His wife was then his campaign manager.
I enjoyed working for a woman. I learned a lot about equal opportunity, which
I have tried to live out in my own life. Well, Joe Duffey didn't win that
race for the Senate. And 4 years later I went home to Arkansas, and I ran
for Congress, and I lost my race, too. And I thought how ironic it is that
our failed efforts to get to Congress made us both President. |Laughter~

Finally, let me say that in my senior year at Georgetown, in the winter,
on a day very much like today, I had a date with a girl from American University.
I didn't think about this until I got in the car to come up here today, but
it was snowing like crazy that night, just like it was today. And I creeped
along in my car from Georgetown to American with this fellow who was in my
class. And we picked up these two fine women from American University. And
we went to the movie, and then we went to dinner. We went to a movie, we
took them home, and then we were driving home. As we were driving home it
was very slick, just like it is today. And I put my brakes on when I was
almost home, and my car went into a huge spin. And it missed this massive
pole on which the stoplight was by about 2 inches. And I couldn't help thinking
after my speech last week how many more people would have been happy in America
if I'd been a little bit closer to that pole 25 years ago. |Laughter~

Thirty years ago in the last year of his short but brilliant life, John Kennedy
came to this university to address the paramount challenge of that time:
the imperative of pursuing peace in the face of nuclear confrontation. Many
Americans still believe it was the finest speech he ever delivered. Today
I come to this same place to deliver an address about what I consider to
be the great challenge of this day: the imperative of American leadership
in the face of global change.

Over the past year I have tried to speak at some length about what we must
do to update our definition of national security and to promote it and to
protect it and to foster democracy and human rights around the world. Today,
I want to allude to those matters, but to focus on the economic leadership
we must exert at home and abroad as a new global economy unfolds before our
eyes.

Twice before in this century, history has asked the United States and other
great powers to provide leadership for a world ravaged by war. After World
War I, that call went unheeded. Britain was too weakened to lead the world
to reconstruction. The United States was too unwilling. The great powers
together turned inward as violent, totalitarian power emerged. We raised
trade barriers. We sought to humiliate rather than rehabilitate the vanquished.
And the result was instability, inflation, then depression and ultimately
a Second World War.

After the Second War, we refused to let history repeat itself. Led by a great
American President, Harry Truman, a man of very common roots but uncommon
vision, we drew together with other Western powers to reshape a new era.
We established NATO to oppose the aggression of communism. We rebuilt the
American economy with investments like the GI bill and a national highway
system. We carried out the Marshall plan to rebuild war-ravaged nations abroad.
General MacArthur's vision prevailed in Japan, which built a massive economy
and a remarkable democracy. We built new institutions to foster peace and
prosperity: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World
Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and more.

These actions helped to usher in four decades of robust economic growth and
collective security. Yet the cold war was a draining time. We devoted trillions
of dollars to it, much more than many of our more visionary leaders thought
we should have. We posted our sons and daughters around the world. We lost
tens of thousands of them in the defense of freedom and in the pursuit of
a containment of communism.

We, my generation, grew up going to school assemblies learning about what
we would do in the event a nuclear war broke out. We were taught to practice
ducking under our desks and praying that somehow they might shield us from
nuclear radiation. We all learned about whether we needed a bomb shelter
in our neighborhood to which we could run in the event that two great superpowers
rained nuclear weapons on one another. And that fate, frankly, seemed still
frighteningly possible just months before President Kennedy came here to
speak in 1963. Now, thanks to his leadership and that of every American President
since the Second World War from Harry Truman to George Bush, the cold war
is over.

The Soviet Union itself has disintegrated. The nuclear shadow is receding
in the face of the START I and START II agreements and others that we have
made and others yet to come. Democracy is on the march everywhere in the
world. It is a new day and a great moment for America.

Yet, across America I hear people raising central questions about our place
and our prospects in this new world we have done so much to make. They ask:
Will we and our children really have good jobs, first-class opportunities,
world-class education, quality affordable health care, safe streets? After
having fully defended freedom's ramparts, they want to know if we will share
in freedom's bounty.

One of the young public school students President Duffey just introduced
was part of the children's program that I did last Saturday with children
from around America. If you saw their stories, so many of them raised troubling
questions about our capacity to guarantee the fruits of the American dream
to all of our own people.

I believe we can do that, and I believe we must. For in a new global economy,
still recovering from the after-effects of the cold war, a prosperous America
is not only good for Americans, as the Prime Minister of Great Britain reminded
me just a couple of days ago, it is absolutely essential for the prosperity
of the rest of the world.

Washington can no longer remain caught in the death grip of gridlock, governed
by an outmoded ideology that says change is to be resisted, the status quo
is to be preserved like King Canute ordering the tide to recede. We cannot
do that. And so, my fellow Americans, I submit to you that we stand at the
third great moment of decision in the 20th century. Will we repeat the mistakes
of the 1920's or the 1930's by turning inward, or will we repeat the successes
of the 1940's and the 1950's by reaching outward and improving ourselves
as well? I say that if we set a new direction at home, we can set a new direction
for the world as well.

The change confronting us in the 1990's is in some ways more difficult than
previous times because it is less distinct. It is more complex and in some
ways the path is less clear to most of our people still today, even after
20 years of declining relative productivity and a decade or more of stagnant
wages and greater effort.

The world clearly remains a dangerous place. Ethnic hatreds, religious strife,
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the violation of human
rights flagrantly in altogether too many places around the world still call
on us to have a sense of national security in which our national defense
is an integral part. And the world still calls on us to promote democracy,
for even though democracy is on the march in many places in the world, you
and I know that it has been thwarted in many places, too. And yet we still
face, overarching everything else, this amorphous but profound challenge
in the way humankind conducts its commerce.

We cannot let these changes in the global economy carry us passively toward
a future of insecurity and instability. For change is the law of life. Whether
you like it or not, the world will change much more rapidly in your lifetime
than it has in mine. It is absolutely astonishing the speed with which the
sheer volume of knowledge in the world is doubling every few years. And a
critical issue before us and especially before the young people here in this
audience is whether you will grow up in a world where change is your friend
or your enemy.

We must challenge the changes now engulfing our world toward America's enduring
objectives of peace and prosperity, of democracy and human dignity. And we
must work to do it at home and abroad.

It is important to understand the monumental scope of these changes. When
I was growing up, business was mostly a local affair. Most farms and firms
were owned locally; they borrowed locally; they hired locally; they shipped
most of their products to neighboring communities or States within the United
States. It was the same for the country as a whole. By and large, we had
a domestic economy.

But now we are woven inextricably into the fabric of a global economy. Imports
and exports, which accounted for about $1 in $10 when I was growing up, now
represent $1 in every $5. Nearly three-quarters of the things that we make
in America are subject to competition at home or abroad from foreign producers
and foreign providers of services. Whether we see it or not, our daily lives
are touched everywhere by the flows of commerce that cross national borders
as inexorably as the weather.

Capital clearly has become global. Some $3 trillion of capital race around
the world every day. And when a firm wants to build a new factory, it can
turn to financial markets now open 24 hours a day, from London to Tokyo,
from New York to Singapore. Products have clearly become more global. Now
if you buy an American car, it may be an American car built with some parts
from Taiwan, designed by Germans, sold with British-made advertisements,
or a combination of others in a different mix.

Services have become global. The accounting firm that keeps the books for
a small business in Wichita may also be helping new entrepreneurs in Warsaw.
And the same fast food restaurant that your family goes to or at least that
I go to--|laughter~--also may well be serving families from Manila to Moscow
and managing its business globally with information technologies, and satellites.

Most important of all, information has become global and has become king
of the global economy. In earlier history, wealth was measured in land, in
gold, in oil, in machines. Today, the principal measure of our wealth is
information: its quality, its quantity, and the speed with which we acquire
it and adapt to it. We need more than anything else to measure our wealth
and our potential by what we know and by what we can learn and what we can
do with it. The value and volume of information has soared; the half-life
of new ideas has trumped.

Just a few days ago, I was out in Silicon Valley at a remarkable company
called Silicon Graphics that has expanded exponentially, partly by developing
computer software with a life of 12 months to 18 months, knowing that it
will be obsolete after that and always being ready with a new product to
replace it.

We are in a constant race toward innovation that will not end in the lifetime
of anyone in this room. What all this means is that the best investment we
can make today is in the one resource firmly rooted in our own borders. That
is, in the education, the skills, the reasoning capacity, and the creativity
of our own people.

For all the adventure and opportunity in this global economy, an American
cannot approach it without mixed feelings. We still sometimes wish wistfully
that everything we really want, particularly those things that produce good
wages, could be made in America. We recall simpler times when one product
line would be made to endure and last for years. We're angry when we see
jobs and factories moving overseas or across the border or depressing wages
here at home when we think there is nothing we can do about it. We worry
about our own prosperity being so dependent on events and forces beyond our
shores. Could it be that the world's most powerful nation has also given
up a significant measure of its sovereignty in the quest to lift the fortunes
of people throughout the world?

It is ironic and even painful that the global village we have worked so hard
to create has done so much to be the source of higher unemployment and lower
wages for some of our people. But that is no wonder. For years our leaders
have failed to take the steps that would harness the global economy to the
benefit of all of our people, steps such as investing in our people and their
skills, enforcing our trade laws, helping communities hurt by change; in
short, putting the American people first without withdrawing from the world
and people beyond our borders.

The truth of our age is this and must be this: Open and competitive commerce
will enrich us as a nation. It spurs us to innovate. It forces us to compete.
It connects us with new customers. It promotes global growth without which
no rich country can hope to grow wealthier. It enables our producers who
are themselves consumers of services and raw materials to prosper. And so
I say to you in the face of all the pressures to do the reverse, we must
compete, not retreat.

Our exports are especially important to us. As bad as the recent recession
was, it would have gone on for twice as long had it not been for what we
were able to sell to other nations. Every $l billion of our exports creates
nearly 20,000 jobs here, and we now have over 7 million export-related jobs
in America. They tend to involve better work and better pay. Most are in
manufacturing, and on average, they pay almost $3,500 more per year than
the average American job. They are exactly the kind of jobs we need for a
new generation of Americans.

American jobs and prosperity are reason enough for us to be working at mastering
the essentials of the global economy. But far more is at stake, for this
new fabric of commerce will also shape global prosperity or the lack of it,
and with it, the prospects of people around the world for democracy, freedom,
and peace.

We must remember that even with all our problems today, the United States
is still the world's strongest engine of growth and progress. We remain the
world's largest producer and its largest and most open market. Other nations,
such as Germany and Japan, are moving rapidly. They have done better than
we have in certain areas. We should respect them for it, and where appropriate,
we should learn from that. But we must also say to them, "You, too,
must act as engines of global prosperity." Nonetheless, the fact is
at for now and for the foreseeable future, the world looks to us to be the
engine of global growth and to be the leaders.

Our leadership is especially important for the world's new and emerging democracies.
To grow and deepen their legitimacy, to foster a middle class and a civic
culture, they need the ability to tap into a growing global economy. And
our security and our prosperity will be greatly affected in the years ahead
by how many of these nations can become and stay democracies.

All you have to do to know that is to look at the problems in Somalia, to
look at Bosnia, to look at the other trouble spots in the world. If we could
make a garden of democracy and prosperity and free enterprise in every part
of this globe, the world would be a safer and a better and a more prosperous
place for the United States and for all of you to raise your children in.

Let us not minimize the difficulty of this task. Democracy's prospects are
dimmed, especially in the developing world, by trade barriers and slow global
growth. Even though 60 developing nations have reduced their trade barriers
in recent years, when you add up the sum of their collective actions, 20
of the 24 developed nations have actually increased their trade barriers
in recent years. This is a powerful testament to the painful difficulty of
trying to maintain a high-wage economy in a global economy where production
is mobile and can quickly fly to a place with low wages.

We have got to focus on bow to help our people adapt to these changes, how
to maintain a high-wage economy in the United States without ourselves adding
to the protectionist direction that so many of the developed nations have
taken in the last few years. These barriers in the end will cost the developing
world more in lost exports and incomes than all the foreign assistance that
developed nations provide, but after that they will begin to undermine our
economic prosperity as well.

It's more than a matter of incomes. I remind you: It's a matter of culture
and stability. Trade, of course, cannot ensure the survival of new democracies,
and we have seen the enduring power of ethnic hatred, the incredible power
of ethnic divisions, even among people literate and allegedly understanding,
to splinter democracy and to savage the nation's state.

But as philosophers from Thucydides to Adam Smith have noted, the habits
of commerce run counter to the habits of war. Just as neighbors who raise
each other's barns are less likely to become arsonists, people who raise
each other's living standards through commerce are less likely to become
combatants. So if we believe in the bonds of democracy, we must resolve to
strengthen the bonds of commerce.

Our own Nation has the greatest potential to benefit from the emerging economy,
but to do so we have to confront the obstacles that stand in our way. Many
of our trading partners cling to unfair practices. Protectionist voices here
at home and abroad call for new barriers. And different policies have left
too many of our workers in communities exposed to the harsh winds of trade
without letting them share in the sheltering prosperity trade has also brought
and without helping them in any way to build new ways to work so they can
be rewarded for their efforts in global commerce.

Cooperation among the major powers toward world growth is not working well
at all today. And most of all, we simply haven't done enough to prepare our
own people and to produce our own resources so that we can face with success
the rigors of the new world. We can change all that if we have the will to
do it. Leonardo da Vinci said that God sells all things at the price of labor.
Our labor must be to make this change.

I believe there are five steps we can and must take to set a new direction
at home and to help create a new direction for the world. First, we simply
have to get our own economic house in order. I have outlined a new national
economic strategy that will give America the new direction we require to
meet our challenges. It seeks to do what no generation of Americans has ever
been called upon to do before: to increase investment in our productive future
and to reduce our deficit at the same time.

We must do both. A plan that only plays down the deficit without investing
in those things that make us more productive will not make us stronger. A
plan that only invests more money without bringing down the deficit will
weaken the fabric of our overall economy such that even educated and productive
people cannot succeed in it.

It is more difficult to do both. The challengers are more abrasive. You have
to cut more other spending and raise more other taxes. But it is essential
that we do both: invest so that we can compete; bring down the debt so that
we can compete. The future of the American dream and the fate of our economy
and much of the world's economy hangs in the balance on what happens in this
city in the next few months.

Already the voices of inertia and self-interest have said, well, we shouldn't
do this or this, or that detail is wrong with that plan. But almost no one
has taken up my original challenge that anyone who has any specific ideas
about how we can cut more should simply come forward with them. I am genuinely
open to new ideas to cut inessential spending and to make the kinds of dramatic
changes in the way Government works that all of us know we have to make.
I don't care whether they come from Republicans or Democrats, or I don't
even care whether they come from at home or abroad. I don't care who gets
the credit, but I do care that we not vary from our determination to pass
a plan that increases investment and reduces the deficit.

I think every one of you who is a student at this university has a far bigger
stake in the future than I do. I have lived in all probability more than
half my life with benefits far beyond anything I ever dreamed or deserved
because my country worked. And I want my country to work for you.

The plan I have offered is assuredly not perfect, but it's an honest and
bold attempt to honestly confront the challenges before us, to secure the
foundations of our economic growth, to expand the resources, the confidence
and the moral suasion we need to continue our global leadership into the
next century. And I plead with all of you to do everything you can to replace
the blame game that has dominated this city too long with the bigger game
of competing and winning in the global economy.

Second, it is time for us to make trade a priority element of American security.
For too long, debates over trade have been dominated by voices from the extremes.
One says governments should build walls to protect firms from competition.
Another says government should do nothing in the face of foreign competition,
no matter what the dimension and shape of that competition is, no matter
what the consequences are in terms of job losses, trade dislocations, or
crushed incomes. Neither view takes on the hard work of creating a more open
trading system that enables us and our trading partners to prosper. Neither
steps up to the task of empowering our workers to compete or of ensuring
that there is some compact of shared responsibility regarding trade's impact
on our people or of guaranteeing a continuous flow of investment into emerging
areas of new technology, which will create the high-wage jobs of the 21st
century.

Our administration is now developing a comprehensive trade policy that will
step up to those challenges. And I want to describe the principles upon which
it will rest. It will not be a policy of blame but one of responsibility.
It will say to our trading partners that we value their business, but none
of us should expect something for nothing.

We will continue to welcome foreign products and services into our markets
but insist that our products and services be able to enter theirs on equal
terms. We will welcome foreign investment in our businesses knowing that
with it come new ideas as well as capital, new technologies, new management
techniques, and new opportunities for us to learn from one another and grow.
But as we welcome that investment, we insist that our investors should be
equally welcome in other countries.

We welcome the subsidiaries of foreign companies on our soil. We appreciate
the jobs they create and the products and services they bring. But we do
insist simply that they pay the same taxes on the same income that our companies
do for doing the same business.

Our trade policy will be part of an integrated economic program, not just
something we use to compensate for the lack of a domestic agenda. We must
enforce our trade laws and our agreements with all the tools and energy at
our disposal. But there is much about our competitive posture that simply
cannot be straightened out by trade retaliation. Better educated and trained
workers, a lower deficit, stable, low interest rates, a reformed health care
system, world-class technologies, revived cities: These must be the steel
of our competitive edge. And there must be a continuing quest by business
and labor and, yes, by Government for higher and higher and higher levels
of productivity.

Too many of the chains that have hobbled us in world trade have been made
in America. Our trade policy will also bypass the distracting debates over
whether efforts should be multilateral, regional, bilateral, unilateral.
The fact is that each of these efforts has its place. Certainly we need to
seek to open other nations' markets and to establish clear and enforceable
rules on which to expand trade.

That is why I'm committed to a prompt and successful completion of the Uruguay
round of the GATT talks. That round has dragged on entirely too long. But
it still holds the potential, if other nations do their share and we do ours,
to boost American wages and living standards significantly and to do the
same for other nations around the world.

We also know that regional and bilateral agreements provide opportunities
to explore new kinds of trade concerns, such as how trade relates to policies
affecting the environment and labor standards and the antitrust laws. And
these agreements, once concluded, can act as a magnet including other countries
to drop barriers and to open their trading systems.

The North American Free Trade Agreement is a good example. It began as an
agreement with Canada, which I strongly supported, which has now led to a
pact with Mexico as well. That agreement holds the potential to create many,
many jobs in America over the next decade if it is joined with others to
ensure that the environment, that living standards, that working conditions,
are honored, that we can literally know that we are going to raise the condition
of people in America and in Mexico. We have a vested interest in a wealthier,
stronger Mexico, but we need to do it on terms that are good for our people.

We should work with organizations, such as the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation
Forum, to liberalize our trade across the Pacific as well.

And let me just say a moment about this: I am proud of the contribution America
has made to prosperity in Asia and to the march of democracy. I have seen
it in Japan after World War II. I have seen it, then, in Taiwan as the country
became more progressive and less repressive at the same time. I have seen
it in Korea as the country has become more progressive and more open. And
we are now making a major contribution to the astonishing revitalization
of the Chinese economy, now growing at 10 percent a year, with the United
States buying a huge percentage of those imports. And I say, I want to continue
that partnership, but I also think we have a right to expect progress in
human rights and democracy and should support that progress.

Third, it is time for us to do our best to exercise leadership among the
major financial powers to improve our coordination on behalf of global economic
growth. At a time when capital is mobile and highly fungible, we simply cannot
afford to work at cross-purposes with the other major industrial democracies.
Our major partners must work harder and more closely with us to reduce interest
rates, stimulate investment, reduce structural barriers to trade, and to
restore robust global growth. And we must look anew at institutions we use
to chart our way in the global economy and ask whether they are serving our
interest in this new world or whether we need to modify them or create others.

Tomorrow, our Treasury Secretary, Secretary Bentsen, and the Federal Reserve
Board Chairman, Alan Greenspan, will meet with their counterparts from these
Group of Seven nations to begin that work. And I look forward to meeting
with the G-7 heads of state and the representatives of the European Community
at our Tokyo summit in July. I am especially hopeful that by then our economic
package here at home will have been substantially enacted by the Congress.
And if that is so, I will be able to say to my counterparts, you have been
telling us for years that America must reduce its debt and put its own house
in order. You have been saying to us for years we must increase in vestment
in our own education and technology to improve productivity. We have done
it. We have done it for ourselves. We have done it for you. Now you must
work with us in Germany and Japan and other nations to promote global growth.

We have to work with these nations. None of us are very good at it. America
doesn't want to give up its prerogatives. The Japanese don't want to give
up theirs. The Germans don't want to give up theirs. There are deep and ingrained
traditions in all these nations. But the fact is that the world can't grow
if America is in recession, but it will be difficult for us to grow coming
out of this recovery unless we can spark a renewed round of growth in Europe
and in Japan. We have got to try to work more closely together.

Fourthly, we need to promote the steady expansion of growth in the developing
world, not only because it's in our interest but because it will help them
as well. These nations are a rapidly expanding market for our products. Some
three million American jobs flow from exports to the developing world. Indeed,
because of unilateral actions taken by Mexico over the last few years, the
volume of our trade has increased dramatically, and our trade deficit has
disappeared.

Our ability to protect the global environment and our ability to combat the
flow of illegal narcotics also rests in large measure on the relationships
we develop commercially with the developing world.

There is a great deal we can do to open the flow of goods and services. Our
aid policies must do more to address population pressures; to support environmentally
responsible, sustainable development; to promote more accountable government;
and to foster a fair distribution of the fruits of growth among an increasingly
restive world population where over one billion people still exist on barely
a dollar a day. These efforts will reap us dividends of trade, of friendship,
and peace.

The final step we must take, my fellow Americans, is toward the success of
democracy in Russia and in the world's other new democracies. The perils
facing Russia and other former Soviet republics are especially acute and
especially important to our future. For the reductions in our defense spending
that are an important part of our economic program over the long run here
at home are only tenable as long as Russia and the other nuclear republics
pose a diminishing threat to our security and to the security of our allies
and the democracies throughout the world. Most worrisome is Russia's precarious
economic condition. If the economic reforms begun by President Yeltsin are
abandoned, if hyperinflation cannot be stemmed, the world will suffer.

Consider the implications for Europe if millions of Russian citizens decide
they have no alternative but to flee to the West where wages are 50 times
higher. Consider the implication for the global environment if all the Chernobyl-style
nuclear plants are forced to start operating there without spare parts, when
we should be in a phased stage of building them down, closing them up, cleaning
them up. If we are willing to spend trillions of dollars to ensure communism's
defeat in the cold war, surely we should be willing to invest a tiny fraction
of that to support democracy's success where communism failed.

To be sure, the former Soviet republics and especially Russia, must be willing
to assume most of the hard work and high cost of the reconstruction process.
But then again, remember that the Marshall plan itself financed only a small
fraction of postwar investments in Europe. It was a magnet, a beginning,
a confidence-building measure, a way of starting a process that turned out
to produce an economic miracle.

Like Europe then, these republics now have a wealth of resources and talent
and potential. And with carefully targeted assistance, conditioned on progress
toward reform and arms control and nonproliferation, we can improve our own
security and our future prosperity at the same time we extend democracy's
reach.

These five steps constitute an agenda for American action in a global economy.
As such, they constitute an agenda for our own prosperity as well. Some may
wish we could pursue our own domestic effort strictly through domestic policies,
as we have understood them in the past. But in this global economy, there
is no such thing as a purely domestic policy. This thing we call the global
economy is unruly. It's a bucking bronco that often lands with its feet on
different sides of old lines and sometimes with its whole body on us. But
if we are to ride the bronco into the next century, we must harness the whole
horse, not just part of it.

I know there are those in this country in both political parties and all
across the land who say that we should not try to take this ride, that these
goals are too ambitious, that we should withdraw and focus only on those
things which we have to do at home. But I believe that would be a sad mistake
and a great loss. For the new world toward which we are moving actually favors
us. We are better equipped than any other people on Earth by reason of our
history, our culture, and our disposition, to change, to lead, and to prosper.
The experience of the last few years where we have stubbornly refused to
make the adjustments we need to compete and win are actually atypical and
unusual seen against the backdrop of our Nation's history.

Look now at our immigrant Nation and think of the world toward which we are
tending. Look at how diverse and multiethnic and multilingual we are, in
a world in which the ability to communicate with all kinds of people from
all over the world and to understand them will be critical. Look at our civic
habits of tolerance and respect. They are not perfect in our own eyes. It
grieved us all when there was so much trouble a year ago in Los Angeles.
But Los Angeles is a county with 150 different ethnic groups of widely differing
levels of education and access to capital and income. It is a miracle that
we get along as well as we do. And all you have to do is to look at Bosnia,
where the differences were not so great, to see how well we have done in
spite of all of our difficulties.

Look at the way our culture has merged technology and values. This is an
expressive land that produced CNN and MTV. We were all born for the information
age. This is a jazzy nation, thank goodness, for my sake. It created be-bop
and hip-hop and all those other things. We are wired for real time. And we
have always been a nation of pioneers. Consider the astonishing outpouring
of support for the challenges I laid down last week in an economic program
that violates every American's narrow special interest if you just take part
of it out and look at it.

And yet, here we are again, ready to accept a new challenge, ready to seek
new change because we're curious and restless and bold. It flows out of our
heritage. It's ingrained in the soul of Americans. It's no accident that
our Nation has steadily expanded the frontiers of democracy, of religious
tolerance, of racial justice, of equality for all people, of environmental
protection and technology and, indeed, the cosmos itself. For it is our nature
to reach out. And reaching out has served not only ourselves but the world
as well.

Now, together, it is time for us to reach out again: toward tomorrow's economy,
toward a better future, toward a new direction, toward securing for you,
students at American University, the American dream.